Remembering and Forgetting at Counterplay 2017: MoRM Returns

The Museum of Random Memory is dedicated to the overlooked, the unloved, and the forgotten.

During CounterPlay ‘17, The Museum of Random Memory will be actively building its temporary permanent collection. This participatory performance and exhibition invites participants to think about the process of making memories, to play around with the idea that remembering and forgetting are not always distinct. We ask participants to contribute something they’d like to forget and walk them through a process of dis-remembering, de-archiving, and dis-preserving. It’s a playful process, but also helps us think critically about how individual, city, and cultural memories are built, archived, stored, displayed in a digital world.

We’ll be posting some of our work-in-progress as we do our last minute planning for this week’s installation at DOKK1 in Aarhus, Denmark. Stop by and contribute something you’d like to forget.

We designed this exhibition to be participatory so the ideas could unfold playfully over two days around questions that are very STS-inspired, including but not limited to:

What is the process of remembering and forgetting in the digital age?

How are memories archived for us by digital platforms like facebook and google?

How are we creating future memories?

Could we be more critical and conscious of how our future heritage is being created, not only by us but by many automated features of new tech?

What do the affordances of social media like Facebook encourage us to remember….and how?

How might Denmark or Aarhus think creatively about what futures they’re creating in their routine collection of data for the City Archives?

Who’s histories get to count?

Who or what might be forgotten?

100 years from now, what will archeologists find to teach them about what happened back in 2017? What would we like them to find? How can we use everyday memory-making practices to consider possible future trajectories, through a future-oriented archeological perspective?

Creating Future Memories

This is part of a series of articles related to Creating Future Memories, an Aarhus University funded research project exploring speculative, future-oriented, and participatory methods for citizens to understand and better control the data being produced through and around the everyday use of digital media.